The Tangled Web We Watch: Hell Yeah!, a Bizarre Animated Series About the Underworld

Even the devout agree that hell is shitty. So the premise of Sam Yousefian and Craig Ginsberg's zany, profane and delightful web series, Hell Yeah! — that Satan is sick of the underworld and looking for a promotion — is practically religious doctrine. Its creators still get the obligatory hate mail, though. Hell Yeah! may nudge at the boundaries of blasphemy when Jesus slimes Satan for using his name in vain, but at least everyone gets pissed when the sinful worshippers of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster come to town.

Yousefian and Ginsberg spend their days animating creative online ads through their company, Smash5Media. Until last year, they spent their free time brainstorming and pitching animated shows to television networks. "Going through the pitch process, you sometimes feel like you're just relying on someone being in a good mood that day," Yousefian tells the Weekly. So the two stopped waiting for the network nod and decided to take production into their own hands, with hilarious results.

To produce high-quality animation in their off-hours, Yousefian and Ginsberg adapted a process called inverse kinematics, usually used on 3-D characters, and applied it to their 2-D inhabitants of heaven and hell. On their YouTube channel, they feature tutorials on how to use this method by manipulating a character's body parts with puppet pins rather than drawing every frame.

Sharing their secrets alongside their strong content has brought encouraging traffic to the channel, and Smash5 soon will expand with its second series, Chicken Strips. It's a show about a chicken strip club called Fowl Play run by a big black cock. Adult Swim, eat your heart out. —Stephanie Carrie

The Tangled Web We Watch is our new column on what's worth watching online. Watch Hell Yeah! at bitly.com/laweeklyhell. Read a full interview with Sam Yousefian about creating Hell Yeah! on Stephanie Carrie's blog, tangledwebwewatch.com.